No more essays?

[robinturner]

I'm not sure if this is a subtle April Fool's joke (and an early one, since it's dated March 31st). This article reports how one university is considering getting rid of asessed essays because of excessive student plagiarism. This makes me feel like the kind of retired colonel who writes irate letters to The Times along the lines of "When I was a boy, any of us who were caught plagiarising were thrashed soundly on our bare buttocks then sent on a fifty-mile cross country run, and it never did me any harm!" Seriously though, if they know this much plagiarism is going on, they must know which essays were plagiarised, so why don't they just through the students in question out of the university? That was the policy when I was a boy - oops, student - and plagiarism was accordingly rare.

Other faculty members are disturbed by this proposal, since, they argue, it will contribute to the already alarming phenomenon of undergraduate illiteracy.

Judith Golec, associate chairwoman in the sociology department at the University of Alberta, said professors in her department are resisting the move away from take-home papers. "We haven't abandoned essay writing because it's critical. It's critical to critical work."

Like, uh, yeah - critically critical. In, like, a critical kind of a way.

Added David Rampton, chairman of the English department at the University of Ottawa: "That can't be mimicked in an in-class context. In humanities, there should be confrontation with the blank page, and that means giving people a chance -- days, even weeks -- to think about a problem, think about their take on it."

Well, in a critical context, my take on this, blank-page-wise, is that English professors should -- even if it takes days, even weeks -- practice more of what they preach.

Comments

[circumambulate.livejournal.com]

I've seen a steady decline in general University education, as they moved from institutional models, to business models. There have been a number of cases of difficult classes being dropped due to low-enrollment, and the like. Departments now have to compete for funding based on how much students like their classes, rather than academic rigor.

Pisses me off, it does.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I thank my lucky stars that our rector, despite being an engineering graduate, is strongly in favour of old-fashioned liberal education (it was at his insistence that our sophomore students do a course in philosophy from Plato to Marx based on original texts).

I remember having one of my lessons observed about ten years ago. After the class, the observer said, "I think I'd describe your teaching method as humanist. That's not as in 1970s humanistic education, that's as in renaissance humanism."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, you seem to think that there is a body of knowledge that is worth studying for its own sake, that studying it will make you a better person, and that the role of the teacher is to pass on this knowledge."

"Yep, you got me in a nutshell."

[subbes]

My degree is based almost entirely around bullshitting. If I had to write 7 5-page essays a semester, and turn in a 100-page thesis my senior year, THE FRESHMEN SURE AS HELL SHOULD, TOO.

[solri.livejournal.com]

My students write around 5,000 words per semester, and they're not even native English speakers. OK, a lot of them plagiarise, but I just shrug my shoulders and give the assignment a zero.